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Up the Creek
Up the Creek is the ninth level of Crash Bandicoot. Having finally escaped Tribesanistan, Crashie has successfully crossed a hazardous fast-moving ocean current - offscreen, naturally - which has brought him to a peaceful, shallow creek, where he suddenly cannot swim again! And, what do you know, creeks are boringly almost the same as streams! Just, now with Sexy Shirtless Diddy Kongs joining the Sexy Shirtless Non-Copyright-Infringing Venus Fly Traps and Sexy Shirtless Non-Copyright-Infringing Venus Fly Trap Fish for some sexy shirtless fun. But Crashie's on a new island now. He's out in the middle of fucking nowhere. Despite the smell of gunpowder in the air, he would've never thought to expect that he would soon come face-to-face with the Roo-nabomber himself! ''Diagnosis: Extremely Low-Level Video Game Sabotage'' May 24, 1996. Crash Bandicoot's Co-Executive Producer, Allan Becker, was in a pissy mood. Damn inner-city kids and all that. He was tired of his delightful work delightfully designing a delightful platforming experience for a delightful bandicoot delightfully named Crashie. "How un-delightful," he thought. Dr. All-N. Becker's desire for death and destruction was growing by the day, like a flower in the garden of an adorable little old lady who sews the seeds....of destruction. That afternoon, Becker met with Brendan O'Brien, nefariously in character as Dr. Neo Cortex, over coffee at Santa Monica's own Big Mordecai's Bean Drink Shack. The two hoped to utilize Becky's position of power within the development team to completely destroy that delightful bandicootling's chances of success. Unfortunately, the level the development team was working on at the time....was an uber-relaxing creeky stage. Namely, this uber-relaxing creeky stage. All-Ennie was stumped. How could he make one of the most relaxing stages in the game, into pure evil? But Cort-i-sol had a plan. They couldn't ruin it for everybody. But they could ruin it for virginal completionist loserlings. Muahahahaha and whatnot. This stage featured an ! Crate that filled in a pair of Outline Crates earlier in the level. Backtracking was a must. Dr. N. Cortex and Dr. All-N. Becker's plan was to simply remove these outlines. Then no one would ever have any chance at all of knowing they had to backtrack! No one would ever be able to receive this level's beautiful Clear Gem, ever! It surely was the most dastardly evil plan since Bonzo the Soviet Chimp successfully discredited Ronald Reagan by appearing in a genteel 1950s comedy film with him, ultimately causing Reaggie to lose the 1980 US Presidential election. And like that brilliant and successful evil scheme, this one also failed miserably. Sony Computer Entertainment America caught wind of Becker's malfeasance, and filled with extreme rage over the incident, they immediately had him terminated from Naughty Dog seven months later during the preliminary work on Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Goes on Strike. Furthermore, gamers somehow did figure this puzzle out quite fine, actually, despite their many drug-fueled rantings online about how fucking stupid it was. Because of his grave miscalculation, Beckeroonie's career was effectively destroyed. He struggled to pull everything back together, but he was only ever able to achieve extremely low-level positions, such as Senior Director of games in the extremely unpopular God of War series of games (and the spin-off, Jesus of War). What a fucking loser. Surely there is a terrific moral to be learned from Dr. Becker. That being, of course, to never, ever let the forces of evil get the best of you. (Also, hiring a sassy black receptionist for your inner-city professional medical science practice inherently counts as "comedy" for the CBS crowd. This is also important to remember!) Trivia *This level's title could be a reference to a film called Up the Creek, of which two exist. One is an exotic, incoherent foreign film, a British comedy from 1958, featuring an officer played by David Tomlinson taking command of a Royal Navy vessel. The other is a delightful American comedy from 1984, about a collegiate raft race, wherein drunken hijinx ensue, because the college students, they drink literally all the time, since this is scientifically proven to improven one's ability to learn. Regrettably, neither of these films features an actual creek. According to most Air Force biologists, however, the river from the latter film is closer to being a creek than the ocean from the former. *More likely, it is actually a clever and witty pun on the popular British mystery series, Jonathan Creek, which features Alan Davies as a brilliant designer of magic tricks who, as it turns out, is also a brilliant solver of baffling murder death crimes, despite the fact that the real-world Alan Davies is actually a retard. The fact that this game was released in 1996, while the series didn't even début until 1997, is probably a sly reference on the developers' part to the types of impossibilities that Jonathan Creek, the character played by RetarDavies, solves all the time. *Meanwhile, some particularly boring fans insist that the title is simply a reference to the popular saying "up the creek without a paddle". This is fucking boring, though it is interesting to note that, contrary to other levels in the game, Crashie actually does not wield a paddle in this stage.